A posting on Facebook yesterday gave a little bit of an inside look into the wild and profitable world of Nephilim hunting. Mirrell Blum claims after the death of her grandfather, she learned that he had had an encounter with a Bigfoot, which she sees as a Biblical Nephilim giant and blogs about on her “Giant in My Backyard” blog. Blum alleges that she possesses a letter describing her grandfather’s encounter with the beast and records of where the monster was buried. I’m inclined to think it’s a fake, but that’s beside the point.

Blum contacted two Christian extremist Nephilim hunters, L. A. Marzulli and Steve Quayle, for help investigating the Bible giant, and she said that they tried to convince her that the government would seize all the evidence unless she signed over the rights to filming the excavation of the monster’s body to them, without no payment. On Facebook Blum wrote:

At first they tried to scare us (and succeeded) into believing that the government would swoop down on us and confiscate our findings if we didn’t use their personal resources and let them film it for their DVD series they both have. [..] Quayle and Marzulli won't share [our story] because we turned down their less than generous offer to film everything and sell it without giving us a dime.

There are no winners here. Blum wants payment for her Bigfoot rather than inviting the news media and scientists to come see it, but if this account is true Marzulli and Quayle are worse because they want to exploit Blum for personal profit while also engaging in paranoid conspiracy.

I was also quite disappointed by a new “scientific” report about the origin of dragons that turned up in my inbox yesterday. I get 50 or more press releases every day, but this one stood out because it claimed that scientists have identified the fossils that inspired the myth of the dragon. Sadly, I have to dissent because, in my judgment, the scientists started with an observation and then tried to work backward to “prove” their speculation true. Let’s take a look at the claim and where it went wrong.

The story starts at a quarry in West Virginia where Roanoke College paleobotanist DorothyBelle Poli thought she saw the outline of a fire-breathing dragon in some impressions on the quarry wall. After describing the illusion, Lisa Stoneman, a folklorist, suggested that Poli had made an important discovery. Fossils of the Carboniferous plant Lepidodendron resemble snake scales, and its fossils can sometimes reach up to fifteen feet in length. The fossils are quite impressive, and appear almost geometric. But in their larger sizes, they are quite clearly fossils of plants.

Lepidodendron fossil at the State Museum of Pennsylvania (Wikimedia Commons)

Nevertheless, unbeknownst to Poli and Stoneman, their observation is not new. According to Victorian barrister, zoologist, and geologist Henry Woodward, quarrymen and fossil collectors had long called the fossils of the Lepidodendron “dragon’s skin” when they dug them up in quarries.

Poli and Stoneman charged their students with examining where Lepidodendron fossils are located to see if they correlate to locations where dragons were alleged to live, and they believe that the two maps are absolutely identical.

“We began with the United Kingdom and China and quickly branched out to the world,” Stoneman said in the press release. “Some locations were saturated with overlapping information. In some regions of the UK, the tales and the fossils were located within just a few miles of each other. And in places like Japan, where there is a lack of fossils, there is a lack of primary dragon lore.”

Primary dragon lore? I hope that the problems with Stoneman’s idea immediately jumped out at you.

Japan is soaked with dragon legends! Japanese dragon stories are innumerable, but Stoneman wants to attribute them to China to force them to fit the fossil distribution pattern. It is certainly true that Japanese dragon stories derive from China and Korea (and India, for that matter), but many believe that they sit atop a native strata of serpent lore. At any rate, though, the written accounts of dragons in Japan go back at least to the seventh century CE, with an oral version obviously much older, raising an important and complicated question of what counts as a “native” dragon myth. The trouble is that the British dragon myths aren’t indigenous either, at least not in the sense that they arose in the land where they are told. They come from Celtic and Greco-Roman dragon stories, both reflexes of the Indo-European dragon-slaying myth, and both brought to Britain in identifiable historical periods. At this remove, it is impossible to determine whether there were preexisting dragon stories before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans.

Beyond this, there is also a lack of literary or physical evidence that ancient people recognized these fossils as belonging to dragons. We read, for example, frequently of the bones of dragons, but not samples of their skin. We also find ancient and medieval sites where “dragon” bones displayed, and these were typically elephant or whale bones. We do not hear of samples of dragon skin being displayed, and there is no evidence that ancient or medieval people believed that animals’ skin could turn to stone. Those quarrymen who named the Lepidodendron “dragon’s skin” weren’t building on an earlier tradition, but were assigning fanciful names, as they did to other fossils, whose popular names ranged from “fairy loaves” to “Cupid’s wings.”

In fact, we have some fairly good evidence that the Chinese, one of Stoneman’s most important dragon believers, did not specifically identify the plants’ fossils as dragon’s scales. Travelers who visited China in the nineteenth century reported that small fossil teeth were sold in apothecaries there as the scales of dragons. Similarly, according to Adrienne Mayor, the dragon (Ko-nea-rau-neh-neh) scales worn by the Iroquois as protective amulets were really flat, sheet-like pieces of mica. The Navajo identified dragon scales with the bony plates on dinosaurs called scutes.

In a classic example of begging the question, the researchers formed a Dragon Research Collaborative and described their mission this way: “This group started with a central question about the connection of Carboniferous plant fossils to dragon lore ­ the rest evolved naturally as the data progressed,” the group’s website reads. In other words, they started with the conclusion they wanted to reach, based on their own fields of interest (fossil plants and folklore), and worked backward to find the data to support it, regardless of better or parsimonious explanations. To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

It gives me no pleasure to criticize the conclusions of what seems to be a very earnest group of undergraduate students and their teachers, but it just doesn’t add up.

Are Poli and Stoneman entirely unaware that the very basis for the Emperorship of Japan rests on the Imperial Family allegedly descending from the storm god Susanoo- slayer of the eight-headed serpent, Yamata-no-Orochi- and his sister Amaterasu (via her grandson)?

As dragon stories go, it's probably my favorite. Orochi has eight heads, eight tales, stretches over eight hills and eight valleys, is trying to eat the eighth of eight young girls and is only taken down because Susanoo gets him drunk with eight vats of eight-fold sake. Susanoo hacks the serpent from heads to tails until he finds a magical sword that serves today as one of the mythic Imperial Regalia of Japan - the Kusanagi.

Even the most cursory of attempts to locate a dragon in Japan should have turned up the Yamata-no-Orochii, or at the very least Shenrong of DBZ fame.

The only way it makes sense to me that the students sent to mine the data never submitted a serpent story as a dragon story and Poli and Stoneman didn't bother to do their own checking. Stoneman's status as a folklorist should theoretically mean she has the knowledge and/or tools to figure that sort of thing out, but it all seems rather lazy to me.

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V

7/13/2016 07:21:45 pm

Ehhhhh....even in the Japanese, Yamata-no-Orochi is definitely identified as a SERPENT, though, not as a dragon. A far better example would be Ryuujin, the Dragon God of the Sea, who was father to the goddess Otohime, who was identified as first emperor of Japan Emperor Jimmu's grandmother. (She purportedly married the third son of Amaterasu's grandson Ninigi.)

Hell, even WIKIPEDIA knows dragons are in fact native to Japanese mythology: "The ca. 680 AD Kojiki and the ca. 720 AD Nihongi mytho-histories have the first Japanese textual references to dragons. "In the oldest annals the dragons are mentioned in various ways," explains de Visser (1913:135), "but mostly as water-gods, serpent- or dragon-shaped."" (From the Wikipedia article, "Japanse dragon")

I agree, these idiots didn't even do basic fact-checking. They're very earnest IDIOTS who need to re-take Freshman English.

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Shane Sullivan

7/14/2016 12:51:04 pm

Keep in mind that the word "dragon" comes from the Greek "drakon", which means "serpent". Of course that raises the question of why, with snakes to be found on virtually every landmass on earth besides Antarctica and a few islands, we need plant fossils to explain dragon myths.

V

7/14/2016 11:17:13 pm

You do have a point, Shane. I was only thinking of the fact that Japan has three kanji for dragon, and none appears in the name Yamato no Orochi. In fact, the name "Yamato no Orochi" literally means "giant snake/serpent of eight branches/forks." It seems to be treated differently than dragons, generally speaking, and might be more akin to the Greek hydra...which sort of hovers on the very edges of dragon-like mythology. Sometimes is classified as a dragon, sometimes is not, you know?

Ryuujin, however, the Dragon God of the Sea, is spelled very definitively with a kanji for "dragon" and the kanji for "god," and is treated much more in line with the more usual reverence for dragons as powerful, dangerous, but overall benign beings typical for Asian dragon stories.

I agree, though; we really don't have to look to plant fossils to explain dragon myths, since we have not only snakes but crocodiles, alligators, and other reptiles all over the world. (And yes, saltwater crocodiles even hit up Japan, oh friends that need to retake Freshman English.)

orang

7/13/2016 12:28:27 pm

if this is a typical example of the teaching one receives at Roanoke College, then its students should demand a tuition refund.

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Clete

7/13/2016 01:14:02 pm

Not really the scientific method. You do not start with your theory and work backward, cutting and pasting facts to support the theory you all ready have. You start from the facts, all of them, and work toward a theory that can be tested by other, independent researchers.

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Only Me

7/13/2016 05:11:57 pm

Actual fossilized dinosaur skin is rare, but exists. It looks nothing like the Lepidodendron fossil. The closest animals that resemble the armored appearance sometimes used to describe dragons are crocodilians.

As Jason pointed out, if plant fossils identified as "dragon skin" was a widespread belief, we should have examples of such fossils being openly displayed, like the bones. I mean, shit, we still have claims of Yeti/Bigfoot hair. I would think "dragon skin" would have been almost revered in ancient and medieval times.

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Kathleen

7/13/2016 05:52:28 pm

I went to the "Giant in my Backyard" blog and Ms.Blum has gotten out the heavy equipment and found some hair at the burial site. DNA analysis is pending. I read the letter and the language did not seem natural to me. I don't know if her father was an author or was a professional where writing is emphasized, so this is just my take on the contents. The opening "Where do I begin?" sounds as stilted as if he had started with "It was a dark and stormy night".

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Only Me

7/13/2016 06:00:49 pm

I just hope she doesn't go full-blown conspiracy mode when the test results show anything other than an unknown primate. That has been the common reaction when all previously tested samples have come back as bear, deer, coyote, etc.

Uncle Ron

7/13/2016 06:19:00 pm

I hope you meant "has gotten out the heavy equipment" in the analogous sense - i.e. that she started some actual work - as opposed to literally meaning that she is using a backhoe. :)

Kathleen

7/13/2016 06:30:46 pm

Sorry, she really is using a backhoe.

Andy White

7/13/2016 07:57:15 pm

Did you pay the $0.99 to view the pictures and video?

I'm literally shaking my head.

Kathleen

7/13/2016 08:49:38 pm

Good gracious, no! That and a penny will get me some aspirin from the dollar store. I think we'll both need some

Andy White

7/13/2016 10:29:40 pm

I can't believe anyone in their right mind would ever just fill in boxes with their name and credit card information on a Bigfoot conspiracy site. Who wants to volunteer?

John (the other one)

7/13/2016 11:14:20 pm

Gotta admit it's pretty tempting. A visa gift card is probably the way to go.

Andy White

7/13/2016 11:17:45 pm

Sounds like a good plan - do it! Let us know what you find out!

Weatherwax

7/14/2016 10:01:22 am

Since Andy White is on the road, I'm going to take the liberty of posting his latest findings. Very enlightening.
http://www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/i-smell-something-and-its-not-a-giant-beast-man-buried-in-the-yard

Yes, thanks. I got suckered in by the photos. At least I didn't take the financial step over the brink. Now I really need those aspirins.

Killbuck

7/13/2016 09:27:47 pm

Well, I see they are doing their best to keep it all hush hush from the Govt. The feds will NEVER catch on.

Keep up the good work.

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REV. E. HERNANDEZ

7/17/2016 11:31:07 am

Hi JC, do you happen to have a book out that explores these key terms such as "Nephilim", and the sudden attention they summon? I've noted an evil pattern of repetition which appears to be based on the idea that if one repeats something ad nauseam, it makes it true. Anyway, also thanks for reminding me of Hitler's famous, "The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it." Keep up the good work and thank you for this blog.

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E.P. Grondine

7/17/2016 12:35:17 pm

Adrienne Mayor's followup book on Fossil Legends of the Native Americans was very a good read, but in the case of the Nakota and Osage she confused memories of the Holocene Start Impact Events with fossil legends.

More than a few Native American peoples actually remembered the Holocene mega-fauna and what occurred then. Suffice it to say that these impacts were devastating, and traumatizing.

In my opinion, hr book on European fossil legends was both right on and ground breaking.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.